The death of his sister when both were still children has had a huge impact on Kessels’ life. In immediate the aftermath of the tragedy, his parents started a search for the last image they had of her. It was this process that helped them with their grief at the untimely loss of their daughter.
When they found it, they cropped the image in such a way so that the focus was totally on her. They enlarged it and had it framed. Ever since, this photograph has hung in the living room of the Kessels family home.

One Image (2016) is an exhibition about Kessels’s sister, and consists only of this one image. It demonstrates how a seemingly random image can have huge importance, regardless of its quality and how it was taken. It’s a prescient thought in this digital age when the act of taking a photo has, for the average person, been transformed from something done to mark an occasion or special moment to an almost daily habit. All of us walk around with thousands of images of our everyday lives locked away in our phones, collections of pixels that we seldom glance at and on the whole mean absolutely nothing to us. That is, until they do.
Kessel’s latest exhibition reminds us of the need to slow down and take time to discover the story behind a photograph, and then to question how our relationship to what we see changes when we learn it.

17 November 2016 – 5 Januari 2016 
Outdoor and inside the Gallery at the main train station, Wroclaw, Poland